The collectivized mind is wired to other minds, and they exchange gibberish to feel whole.

People are addicted to crap. They like it.

That’s why they watch the news.

That’s why they believe the news.

It’s time for a worldwide Church of the News, with its own priests, its own symbols, and its own prophets. In other words, go to the extreme. Why fiddle around? Bring things out in the open.

Brian Williams would be a saint some day. The great ancestors, like Ed Murrow, Cronkite, and Chet Huntley would be celebrated figures in testaments.

Sunday services would feature many screens with simultaneous broadcasts. This would be the first Church that has such an extensive record of its own history. On television.

Think of it. Straight-out worship of the news.

“I had my conversion-experience one night while Diane Sawyer was in her cups, explaining the loss of life in a storm in Kansas. I suddenly realized I was receiving revelation…”

We already have the Church of Biological Mysticism, in which all human suffering is explained by the germ theory or genes. So we need the Church of the News.

If there’s a 36-car pile-up outside Chicago, in the fog, hundreds of millions of people see pictures of it within minutes. It’s automatically a Church document. No need to explain it. Let the anchors who are on-air explain it. Then everyone can suck it in, in the same way.

CBS, NBC, and ABC are wings of the great cathedral. Their anchors are angels right here, right now.

The Church leadership will be composed of the Great Ones, the men who run the corporations that own the networks. The power behind the throne.

Heretics, of course, are necessary. They’re the “conspiracy theorists,” those evil and demented people who challenge official scenarios touted by the news.

The Church is a herald of the New World Order: Globalism. Establishing one body to rule the planet is its mission. Therefore, worshipers are dedicated as well. Eliminate nations. Erase borders. Allow mega-corporations to roam free and wild and buy up land, resources, and labor anywhere and everywhere.

Bring it all out into the open.

But whether it’s a new UN treaty, a car crash, a murder in a motel, a breakthrough in lip gloss, it’s news, so its sacred.

The Church has a basic flat-earth policy. Every substantial story is presented with drastically shortened perspective, eliminating, for example, the people who are running a specific op from behind the scenes. “Behind the scenes” is a phrase rarely mentioned by the Church.

If we throw in CNN, FOX, and MSNBC, the Church has 24/7 services. That’s quite a reach. Disparate loons like Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch are united in Church annals, as they should be. They’re both significant promulgators of the faith.

And who plays Satan? The Internet, of course. Tax it, control it, censor it, curse it. Cast it out.

Why let people merely bow and kneel down to the news in the privacy of their own minds? Build churches and monuments to externalize and celebrate the broadcasts that shape their reality. There’s no need to hide.

“This is what we know. This is what we see. This is all there is. The news.”

The narration of what exists.

New holidays. The Day of Celebrity Gossip, commemorating a year’s worth of salacious invasions into the lives of meaningless stars. Parishioners on bended knee are fed sugary confections at the altar.

The Day of Commercials, honoring those stalwart companies who support the Church with their ad buys and product placements.

From The Children, one will rise to be the premier elite anchor of his generation. To him is given the nod of the Great Corporate Owners, to safeguard the ad buys, the ratings, and the dispensing of the story lines.

The Church capsulizes and distorts the people it covers on the news, plugging them into an overall cartoon-front. Individuals mustn’t stand out from the televised background. Too provocative, too dangerous. Too disruptive. By contrast, they might expose the whole charade.

From time to time, the news runs up against rebels who challenge the whole broadcast reality.

And once in a while, the rebel holds a few trump cards. This was the case with one of the earliest mass-media duelists, Salvador Dali.

The Strange Case of Dali and the Cosmic Prison Break

The critics would have declared Dali a hopeless lunatic if he hadn’t possessed such formidable classical painting skills.

He placed his repeating images (the notorious melting watch, the face and body of his wife, Gala, the ornate and fierce skeletal structures of unknown creatures) on the canvas as if they had as much right to be there as any familiar object.

This was quite troubling. If an immense jawbone that was also a rib or a forked femur could rival a perfectly rendered lamp or couch or book (on the same canvas), where were all the accoutrements and assurances of modern comfortable living?

Where was the pleasantly mesmerizing effect of a predictable existence?

Where was a protective class structure that depended on nothing more than money and cultural slogans?

To make it worse, Dali invented vast comedies on canvas. But the overall joke turned, as the viewer’s eye moved, into a nightmare, into an entrancing interlude of music, a memory of something that had never happened, a gang of genies coming out of corked bottles.

What was the man doing? Was he thumbing his nose at the audience? Was he simply showing off? Was he inventing waking dreams? Was he, God forbid, actually imagining something entirely new that resisted classification?

Words failed viewers and critics and colleagues and enemies.

But they didn’t fail Dali. He took every occasion to explain his work in press interviews. However, his explications were dealt out in a way that made it plain he was telling tall tales—interesting, hilarious, and preposterous tall tales.

Every interview and press conference he gave, gave birth to more attacks on him. Was he inviting scorn? Was he really above it all? Was he toying with the press like some perverse Olympian?

Media analysts flocked to make him persona non grata, but what was the persona they were exiling? They had no idea then, and they have no idea now.

It’s possible that every statement ever uttered in public by Dali was a lie. A fabrication. An invention dedicated to constructing a massive (and contradictory) persona.

Commentators who try to take on Dali’s life usually center on the early death of his young brother as the core explanation for Dali’s “basic confusion”—which resulted in his bizarre approach to his own fame.

However, these days, we might more correctly say that Dali was playing the media game on his own terms, after realizing that no reporter wanted the real Dali (whatever that might mean)—some fiction was being asked for, and the artist was merely being accommodating.

He was creating a self that matched his paintings.

It is generally acknowledged that no artist of the 20th century was superior to Dali in the ability to render realistic detail.

At some point in his career, Dali saw (decided) there was no limit to what he could assemble on one canvas. A painting could become a science-fiction novel reaching into several pasts and futures. The protagonist (the viewer) could find himself in such a simultaneity.

Critics have attacked the paintings relentlessly. They are offended at Dali’s skill, which matches the best work of the meticulous Dutch Renaissance masters.

They hate the dissonance. They resent Dali’s wit and rankle at the idea that Dali could carry out monstrous jokes—in such fierce extended detail—on a given canvas.

But above all, the sheer imagination harpoons the critics. How dare a painter turn reality upside down so blatantly, while rubbing their faces in the exquisite detail.

The cherry on the cake was: for every attack the critics launched at Dali the man (they really had no idea who he was), Dali would come back at them with yet another elaborate piece of fiction about himself. It was unfair. The critics were “devoted to the truth.” The painter was free to invent himself over and over as many times as he fancied.

Dali was holding up a mirror. He was saying, “You people are like me. We’re all doing fiction. I’m much better at it. In the process, I get at a much deeper truth.”

The principles of organized society dictate that a person must be who he is, even if that is a cartoon of a cartoon. A person must be one recognizable caricature forever, must be IDed, must have one basic function. Must, as a civilization goes down the trail of decline, submit to being watched and taped and profiled.

When a person shows up who is many different things, who can invent himself at the drop of hat, who seems to stand in 14 different places at the same time, the Order trembles.

This is not acceptable.

(Fake) reality declares: what you said yesterday must synchronize absolutely with what you say today.

This rule (“being the only thing you are”) guarantees that human beings will resonate with the premise that we all live and think and work in one collective continuum of space and time. One. Only one. Forever.

The big lie.

Whatever he was, however despicable he may have been in certain respects, Dali broke that egg. Broke the cardinal rule.

He reveled in doing it. He made people wait for an answer about himself, and the answer never came. Instead, he gave them a hundred answers, improvised in the moment.

He threw people back on their own resources, and those resources proved to be severely limited.

That was too much.

But there the paintings are.

And the pressure has been building. The growing failure of major institutions (centralized hierarchical religion, psychology, education, government) to keep the cork in the bottle signals a prison break in progress.

More people understand that the veil is not really a veil of tears. It’s a curtain madly drawn across the creative force.

The pot is boiling. People want out. It remains to be seen whether people will admit that the veil was and is ultimately of their own making.

Somewhere along the line we have to give the green light to our own creative power. That is the first great day, the dawn of no coerced boundaries. Everything we’ve been taught tells us that a life lived entirely from creative force is impossible. We don’t have it within us. We should maintain silence and propriety in the face of greater official power and wisdom. We must abide by the rules. We must, at best, “surrender to the universe.”

But what if, when we come around the far turn, we see that the universe is us? Is simply one part of imagination? Is a twinkling rendition we installed to keep us titillated with dreams that would forever drift out of reach?

What if we are popping out of the fences of this culture and this continuum and this tired movie? What then?

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon Rappoport was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

Donate and Make a Difference

War Is Crime is an independent non-commercial website. It is not addressed to "the masses" but to the individuals, to you personally. Please consider sending a donation to help us keep it running. Your generous support makes the world a better place!

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.— Aldous Huxley